‘I’ll never again believe anything I read in a history book, as long as I live, so help me.’
‘You’ll have to make exceptions,’ Williams pointed out with Williams’ dogged reasonableness. ‘Queen Victoria was true, and I suppose Julius Caesar did invade Britain. And there’s 1066.’
‘I’m beginning to have the gravest doubts about 1066. I see you’ve tied up the Essex job. What is Chummy like?’
‘A thorough little blighter. Been treated soft all his life since he started stealing change from his Ma at the age of nine. A good belting at the age of twelve might have saved his life. Now he’ll hang before the almond blossom’s out. It’s going to be an early spring. I’ve been working every evening in the garden this last few days, now that the days are drawing out. You’ll be glad to sniff fresh air again.’
And he had gone away, rosy and sane and balanced, as befitted a man who was belted for his good in his youth.
So Grant was longing for some other visitor from the outside world that he was so soon to be a part of again, and he was delighted when the familiar tentative tap came on his door.
‘Come in, Brent!’ he called, joyfully.
And Brent came in.
But it was not the Brent who had last gone out.
Gone was the jubilation. Gone was his newly acquired breadth.
He was no longer Carradine the pioneer, the blazer of trails.
He was just a thin boy in a very long, very large overcoat. He looked young, and shocked, and bereaved.
Grant watched him in dismay as he crossed the room with his listless unco-ordinated walk. There was no bundle of paper sticking out of his mail-sack of a pocket today.
Oh, well, thought Grant philosophically; it had been fun while it lasted. There was bound to be a snag somewhere. One couldn’t do serious research in that light-hearted amateur way and hope to prove anything by it. One wouldn’t expect an amateur to walk into the Yard and solve a case that had defeated the pro’s; so why should he have thought himself smarter than the historians. He had wanted to prove to himself that he was right in his face-reading of the portrait; he had wanted to blot out the shame of having put a criminal on the bench instead of in the dock. But he would have to accept his mistake, and like it. Perhaps he had asked for it. Perhaps, in his heart of hearts, he had been growing a little pleased with himself about his eye for faces.
‘Hullo, Mr Grant.’
‘Hullo, Brent.’
Actually it was worse for the boy. He was at the age when he expected miracles to happen. He was still at the age when he was surprised that a balloon should burst.
‘You look saddish,’ he said cheerfully to the boy. ‘Something come unstuck.’
‘Everything.’
Carradine sat down on the chair and stared at the window.
‘Don’t these damned sparrows get you down?’ he asked, fretfully.
‘What is it? Have you discovered that there was a general rumour about the boys before Richard’s death, after all?’
‘Oh, much worse than that.’
‘Oh. Something in print? A letter?’
‘No, it isn’t that sort of thing at all. It’s something much worse. Something quite – quite fundamental. I don’t know how to tell you.’ He glowered at the quarrelling sparrows. ‘These damned birds. I can never write that book now, Mr Grant.’
‘Why not, Brent?’
‘Because it isn’t news to anyone. Everyone has known all about those things all along.’
‘Known? About what?’
‘About Richard not having killed the boys at all, and all that.’
‘They’ve known? Since when!’
‘Oh, hundreds and hundreds of years.’
‘Pull yourself together, chum. It’s only four hundred years altogether since the thing happened.’
‘I know. But it doesn’t make any difference. People have known about Richard’s not doing it for hundreds and hundreds—’
‘Will you stop that keening and talk sense. When did this – this rehabilitation first begin?’
‘Begin? Oh, at the first available moment.’
‘When was that?’
‘As soon as the Tudors were gone and it was safe to talk.’
‘In Stuart times, you mean?’
‘Yes, I suppose – yes. A man Buck wrote a vindication in the seventeenth century. And Horace Walpole in the eighteenth. And someone called Markham in the nineteenth.’
‘And who in the twentieth?’
‘No one that I know of.’
‘Then what’s wrong with your doing it?’
‘But it won’t be the same, don’t you see. It won’t be a great discovery!’ He said it in capitals. A Great Discovery.
Grant smiled at him. ‘Oh, come! You can’t expect to pick Great Discoveries off bushes. If you can’t be a pioneer what’s wrong with leading a crusade?’
‘A crusade?’
‘Certainly.’
‘Against what?’
‘Tonypandy.’
The boy’s face lost its blankness. It looked suddenly amused, like someone who has just seen a joke.
‘It’s the damnedest silliest name, isn’t it!’ he remarked.
‘If people have been pointing out for three hundred and fifty years that Richard didn’t murder his nephews and a schoolbook can still say, in words of one syllable and without qualification, that he did, then it seems to me that Tonypandy has a long lead on you. It’s time you got busy.’
‘But what can I do when people like Walpole and those have failed?’
‘There’s that old saying about constant water and its effect on stone.’
‘Mr Grant, right now I feel an awfully feeble little trickle.’
‘You look it, I must say. I’ve never seen such self-pity. That’s no mood to start bucking the British public in. You’ll be giving enough weight away as it is.’
‘Because I’ve not written a book before, you mean?’
‘No, that doesn’t matter at all. Most people’s first books are their best anyway; it’s the one they wanted most to write. No, I meant that all the people who’ve never read a history book since they left school will feel themselves qualified to pontificate about what you’ve written. They’ll accuse you of whitewashing Richard; “whitewashing” has a derogatory sound that “rehabilitation” hasn’t, so they’ll call it whitewashing. A few will look up the Britannica, and feel themselves competent to go a little further in the matter. These will slay you instead of flaying you. And the serious historians won’t even bother to notice you.’
‘By God, I’ll make them notice me!’ Carradine said.
‘Come! That sounds a little more like the spirit that won the Empire.’
‘We haven’t got an Empire,’ Carradine reminded him.
‘Oh, yes, you have,’ Grant said equably. ‘The only difference between ours and yours is that you acquired yours, economically, in the one latitude, while we got ours in bits all over the world. Had you written any of the book before the awful knowledge of its unoriginality hit you?’
‘Yes, I’d done two chapters.’
‘What have you done with them? You haven’t thrown them away, have you?’
‘No. I nearly did. I nearly threw them in the fire.’
‘What stopped you?’
‘It was an electric fire.’ Carradine stretched out his long legs in a relaxing movement and began to laugh. ‘Brother, I feel better already. I can’t wait to land the British public one in the kisser with a few home truths. Carradine the First is just raging in my blood.’
‘A very virulent fever, it sounds.’
‘He was the most ruthless old blaggard that ever felled timber. He started as a logger and ended up with a Renaissance castle, two yachts, and a private car. Railroad car, you know. It had green silk curtains with bobbles on them and inlay woodwork that had to be seen to be believed. It has been popularly supposed, not least by Carradine the Third, that the Carradine blood was growing thin. But right now I’m all Carradine the First. I know just how the old boy felt when he wanted to buy a particular forest and someone said that he couldn’t have it. Brother, I’m going to town.’